Detection of Online Contract Cheating Through Stylometry: Results from a Pilot Study

Contract cheating, instances in which a student enlists someone other than themselves to produce coursework, has been identified as a growing problem within academic integrity literature and in news headlines. This session will explain contract cheating and trends of this behavior as well as attempts to identify such instances. Generational sentiments about cheating and the prevalent accessibility of contract cheating providers online seems to only have exacerbated the issue. The problem is that no simple means have been identified and verified to detect contract cheating because available plagiarism detection software is ineffective in these cases. One method commonly used for authorship authentication in nonacademic settings, stylometry, has been suggested as a potential means for detection. Stylometry uses various attributes of documents to determine if they were written by the same individual. Results from a pilot study using three easyto-use and readily available stylometry software systems to detect simulated cases of contract cheating academic documents will be presented. This presentation will show that stylometry software appears to have significant promise for the potential detection of contract cheating with average accuracy ranges from 33% to 88.9%. While more research is necessary, stylometry software appears to show significant promise for the potential detection of contract cheating